Jaipur, December, 2019. Set to take place between 23 and 27 January 2020, the Jaipur Literature Festival returns to its customary home at Jaipur’s Diggi Palace Hotel for its 13th edition.

Jaipur, 16 December: The‘greatest literary show on earth’ unveiled the 2020 edition’s list of over 250 speakers, featuring a stellar line-up of Indian and international names. The speakers consist of writers, thinkers, politicians, journalists and popular cultural icons representing over fifteen Indian languages and twenty-four international languagesas well as major awards such as the Nobel, the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the Sahitya Akademi, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation etc.

The programme, which is vast and kaleidoscopic, with themes ranging from the art, fashion & lifestyle, biographies, business & economics, climate change, current affairs, food, living languages, poetry, science & technology, Artificial Intelligence, gender, and the writing process, etc.

Some highlights from the programme include Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee’s session ‘Poor Economics: Fighting Global Poverty’, where he talks about his innovative field research-based approach to development economics. He explains the need to understand and measure what happens in the real world to alleviate poverty, and the necessity of making the poor and their decision-making central to the process. An inspirational session of insights and learnings vital to understanding our world.

Political philosopher and provocateur Anand Giridharadas takes on the privileged classes in his scorching new book, the bestselling Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The book investigates the global elite’s efforts to ‘change the world’- except using ways that threaten the social order and their

position atop it. Anand Giridharadas will get into a conversation with entrepreneur and investor Mohit Satyanand in a session that offers transformative perspectives to complex societal problems.

Floods have ravaged India’s urban landscapes with unprecedented fury over the last decade. Mumbai, Surat, Srinagar, Chennai, Patna, and cities across Kerala have all been swallowed up by floodwaters and sewage. These were not isolated freak phenomena, but signalled a deeper ecological devastation. In a panel discussion consisting economist, environmentalist and politician Jairam Ramesh, authors Viju B and Krupa Ge in conversation with Marcus Moench, a panel will explore the shocking truth of a man-made flood and seek insights into the causes and consequences of societal folly in abusing nature.

In the session ‘Asia Rising’, author and ex-Portuguese minister Bruno Maçães, ex-national security advisor to the Prime Minister of India Shivshankar Menon, and Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University Deepak Nayyar will discuss and dissect Asia’s place in the new world order. Shivshankar Menon’s latest book, Past Present: India in Asian Geopolitics, takes a profound look at the Asian story. Deepak Nayyar has authored Resurgent Asia, which highlights development and economic transformation over the past fifty years and Bruno Maçães’s recent books include The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of a New World Order, an account of the coming integration of Europe and Asia.

China’s mammoth Belt and Road initiative, straddling almost seventy countries, is an infrastructure project of staggering complexity. Bruno Maçães, the author of Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order will discuss the ambitions and implications of BRI as it tracks new trade and energy routes, with particular emphasis of its feasibility and implications in India and South Asia in a session with Indian authors Manoj Joshi and Sujeev Shakya in conversation with former Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao.

Leading British foreign correspondent Christina Lamb will be in conversation with eminent journalist Suhasini Haidar in a talk about Nujeen who escaped the hell of war in Aleppo and travelled to Europe on a wheelchair. Nujeen's story has already touched millions and in this book written with Christina Lamb, bestselling co-author of ‘I Am Malala’, she helps to put a human face on a global emergency. Trapped in a fifth-floor apartment in Aleppo and unable to go to school, she taught herself to speak English by watching US television. As civil war between Assad's forces and ISIS militants broke out around them, Nujeen and her family fled first to her native Kobane, then to Turkey before they joined thousands of displaced persons in a journey to Europe and asylum.

Two much-loved and inspirational Hindi writers speak of their work and the process of carving out voice and visibility for feminine perspectives. Prolific and much-awarded author Chitra Mudgal, and author of several award-winning poetry collections and novels Anamika will be in conversation with translator and writer Rohini Choudhury, to discuss their books, beliefs and the core of conviction that sustains their writing in a session titled ‘Ek Zameen Apni: Writing the Feminine’.

How does one capture the life of a woman in writing? How different is the feminine biography from that of a man? Biographers Bettany Hughes, Jung Chang, Lindsey Hilsum and Hallie Rubenhold will discuss the difficulty of penning the lives of women in conversation with journalist Anita Anand in a session specifically concentrated on the lives of women.

In another session celebrated actor Madhur Jaffrey, iconic ambassador of Indian cuisine, speaks of her rich, intense full-lived life tracing early years in Delhi, her association with the legendary Ismail Merchant,James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, her encounters with the theatre and film, and finally her recent rap video.She will speak of her intertwined lives, of the theatre of food and the flavour of memories.  A fascinating session with the 86-year-old actor author in conversation with novelist and essayist, Chandrahas Choudhury.

During the Festival, Namita Gokhale, author and Festival Co-director, will launch her new novel, Jaipur Journals. Set against the backdrop of the vibrant Jaipur Literature Festival, it is partly a love letter to the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’, partly an ode to the millions of aspiring authors who wander the earth with unsubmitted manuscripts in their bags - and in the end a tribute to that loneliest tribe of them all: the writers. Namita Gokhale is the author of 18 books, including 9 works of fiction. In conversation with diplomat and author Shashi Tharoor and poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, she will discuss the themes of her new novel and how her two personas – writer and Festival director - come together in it.

In a special session titled ‘The Anarchy’, historian, author and Festival Co-director William Dalrymple will unfold his riveting tale of the first global corporate power, the East Indian Company and its ruthless, methodical plunder of India. Introduced by eminent author Manu S. Pillai. the session will tell the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders.

In a session focused on fiction, five of the world’s celebrated novelists— Elizabeth Gilbert, Leila Slimani, Avni Doshi, John Lancaster and Howard Jacobson share their insights on the art of the novel with Damian Barr. The session will give answers to all the questions like where does fiction come from? What is the process of its creation? How does one make up characters and situations that are believable- and why should the reader care?

The full programme will be available to view at https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/programme

Author and Festival Co-Director Namita Gokhale said,“Come January, a galaxy of writers and thinkers will converge in the heritage city of Jaipur to celebrate the human imagination and the dreaming mind. We are the largest free festival in the world and also perhaps the youngest with 60% of our audiences below 25. We look forward to these crucial conversations between cultures, communities, and generations.”

Writer and Festival Co-Director William Dalrymple said, “This is our strongest Jaipur line up ever. We have an especially triumphant line up in non-fiction with a world-beating roster of award-winning historians, biographers, memoirists and travel writers including our biggest haul of Pullizer Prize winners ever with major international stars like Stephen Greenblatt, Dexter Filkins, Anand Gopal and Suketu Mehta. We also have an astonishing line up of Booker-winning novelists including Howard Jacobson and John Lanchester, Leila Slimani from France and Elizabeth Gilbert from the US. We also much look forward to hearing our most talented ever pool of poets including Lemn Sissay, Simon Armitage, Forrest Gander & Paul Muldoon. Above all we'll have a special focus on Climate change with world-leading experts like David Wallace-Wells.”

Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, the producer of the Jaipur Literature Festival, said,“Jaipur Literature Festival 2020 will feature over 250 speakers from across India and the world who will focus on a variety of themes and issues including climate emergency, women’s voices, travel, science and technology, economics and history.”